Pongo:

Just some food for thought:

You might want to investigate the cost of shipping the bike (by truck or rail) to somewhere near the starting point of the tour, rather than riding it 1,500 km's in 3 days to join up with the tour.

The reason I suggest this is because there are two very different forms of movement involved in motorcycle touring: 'transit' vs. 'touring'. Transit, to me anyway, consists of riding long distances from A to B and then C, etc. without the intention to take it easy and smell the flowers along the way, the only objective being to cover the distance. I can cope with 'transit', but honestly, it's tiring and it is no fun. It kind of ranks together with 'riding in the rain' so far as enjoyment is concerned.

If you do three days of 'transit' before starting the organized tour, I think you might be kind of tired of even seeing the motorcycle on the day that the tour starts, and wishing you could take a couple of days off and just relax. The transit home at the end of the tour will be less of a concern, it is a shorter distance, fewer km's per day (333 vs. 500), and you will be more at ease on the bike after having done the tour (which appears to have a fairly pleasant and relaxed pace - less than 200 km's per day).

It's not particularly expensive to ship a bike by truck or rail - you just strap the thing down on a pallet (with the side-stand deployed, providing a three-point base), in a similar manner to how you would secure it on a ferry or a train. It's possible that you could find a commercial carrier (a trucking company) or a moving company that could transport the bike for you for not much more than the cost of the fuel, hotel, and tolls you would pay if you rode it to the start of the tour.

Michael